Ghul

Remember how we talked about Dark Arabia campaigns?  Ghuls are it, the original ghouls of folklore.  Meanwhile, as far as in-game goes, ghuls are divs’ undead cousins—jann cursed by the Lord of the Divs.  The trick for using ghuls best is to not just cast them as super-ghouls, but to play up their creepiness first.  Have the PCs attend a funeral, only to have one hyena follow them all the way back to town.  Have a crypt be opened, and have the body be gone but the grave shrouds arranged in a parody of table settings.  Have a bride lose her groom to a poisoned wedding feast, then need the PCs to rescue her before a ghul makes her watch him eat the corpse…

An intelligent falchion is a bane weapon against undead and genie-kin, and demands to hunt ghuls at every semi-appropriate opportunity.

Bleak Omar hates his existence as a ghul—not because he laments the jann he was, but because he craves the power that ascension into the div ranks would bring him.  He and his minions go on a murder spree in the hopes of finding a sponsor for his transformation.

As a young sailor, Ariashi Kenpo once mocked the donkey hooves of a ghul he spotted on a moonlit pier.  Fortunately for him, he did this from the stern of his junk, just as it was leaving port.  Ashamed and enraged, the ghul managed to follow him—back to the Land of Poppies and Light, north to Shogunate of Oto, and east to the lands of the Raven Clan.  Now a translator for a pale-skinned tea merchant, Kenpo hears stories of missing corpses and fears the ghul has found him at last.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 3 125

I hope you enjoyed today, because tomorrow the alphabet demands we enter giant animal territory—weeks of them, in fact.  I hope you’ll bear with me.  If not, take a breather and go back and start from the letter A…